The FA bargaining team met with representatives from the administration on Monday, 22 April to discuss credit-hour equivalence amendments in the College of Education, specifically the departments of Kinesiology and Educational Administration and Higher Education. Both of these departments maintain that Addendum B supports accruing and applying credits earned from indirect teaching to workload assignments through a banking model.

During the session, we heard many of the same objections that we’ve already heard: workload is prospective and, as a result it, past work does not or cannot matter for such workload assignments. We tried to point out that the contract already not only acknowledges, but calls for the consideration of prior overloads in making workload assignments (8.07.g.3 if you’re interested), but that did not seem to move matters very far.

Instead, we became embroiled in another discussion of ranges versus specific equivalences. We did hear a new argument: that ranges are the compromise position because originally the administration did not want any numbers at all. This was the first that we’d heard this particular take on this issue, but if you’ve seen or heard it in other meetings please alert one of us. The FA bargaining team would like to thank members of the department of Kinesiology for bearing with this digression.

We didn’t receive an answer when we asked about the problems with the twelve peer models that Educational Administration and Higher Education used to develop their amendment. The general idea seems to be that we shouldn’t use peer models, but should compare departments internally.

When we were able to focus on banking, the administration worried explicitly about a scenario in which faculty members would accumulate loads of indirect teaching and then take three years off and never come back before retirement. We did note that even when Educational Administration and Higher Education offered to sunset accumulated CHE after three years, the provost rejected the proposal.

Finally, the administration suggested that there exists a concept called “administrative freedom” that is analogous to academic freedom. The analogy offered was that the administration doesn’t intervene in how faculty teach courses, so faculty shouldn’t intervene in how administrators make workload assignments. We did point out that department chairs are not teaching us something when they assign workload.

We’ll be turning to papers focused on contact hours next week from the College of Applied Sciences and Arts, specifically the departments of Automotive Technology and Architecture.

As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Ryan Netzley (ranetzley@gmail.com).